Friday, September 30, 2011

"Who are you?" is a surface question which has a vast, intricate rootage. Who are you behind your mask, your role? Who are you behind your words? Who are you when you are alone with yourself? In the middle of the night, when you awake, who are you then? When dawn rescues you from the rainforest of the night, who are you before you slip back safely beneath the mask and the name by which you are known during the day? It is one of the unnoticed achievements of daily life to keep the wild complexity of your real identity so well hidden that most people never suspect the worlds that collide in your heart.

You must always keep in mind that a path is only a path.
Each path is only one of a million paths.
If you feel that you must now follow it,
you need not stay with it under any circumstances.
Any path is only a path.

There is no affront to yourself or others in dropping a path
if that is what your heart tells you to do.

But your decision to keep on a path or to leave it
must be free of fear and ambition.

I caution you: look at every path closely and deliberately.

Try it as many times as you think necessary.
Then ask yourself and yourself alone this one question.
Does this path have a heart?

All paths are the same. They lead nowhere.
They are paths going through the brush or into the brush
or under the brush of the Universe.

The only question is: Does this path have a heart?
If it does, then it is a good path.
If it doesn’t, then it is of no use.

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for
may for once spring clear
without my contriving.
If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,
but this is what I need to say.
May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.
Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has,
streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.

The Wood is shining this morning.
Red, gold and green, the leaves
lie on the ground, or fall,
or hang full of light in the air still.
Perfect in its rise and in its fall, it takes
the place it has been coming to forever.
It has not hastened here, or lagged.
See how surely it has sought itself,
its roots passing lordly through the earth.
See how without confusion it is
all that it is, and how flawless
its grace is. Running or walking, the way
is the same. Be still. Be still.

Each person is a living world of longing. You are here not simply because you were sent here. You are here because you long to be here. A person is an incarnation of longing. Behind your image, role, personality, and deeper than your thoughts, there is a pulse of desire that sustains you in the world. All your thoughts, feelings, and actions arise from a secret source within you which desires life. This is where your sense of life is rooted. Your sense of life expresses itself in your convictions, intentions, and passions; it precedes them. Your sense of life is pre-reflective, yet passionate and powerful. This secret presence of longing helps you endure the routine of the daily round; it emerges strongly when difficulty entangles you, or when suffering strips away your networks of connection with the world. Your sense of life is not something you can invent or force with your mind. It is the wisdom of your clay and is eternally acquainted with awakening.

Monday, September 19, 2011

The unknown evokes wonder. If you lose your sense of wonder, you lose the sacramental majesty of the world. Nature is no longer a presence, it is a thing. Your life becomes a dead cage of fact. The sense of the eternal recedes, and time is reduced to routine. Yet the flow of our lives cannot be stopped. This is one of the amazing facts about being in the dance of life. There is no place to step outside. There is no neutral space in human life. There is no place to go to get out of it. There is no little cabin down at the bottom of the garden where the force and familiarity of life stop, and you can sit there in a space outside your life and yourself and look in on both. Once you are in life, it embraces you totally.

May you know that absence is full of tender presence and
that nothing is forgotten.
May the absences in your life be full of eternal echo.
May you sense around you the secret Elsewhere which
holds the presences that have left your life.
May you be generous in your embrace of loss.
May the sore well of grief turn into a well of seamless
presence.
May your compassion reach out to the ones we never hear
from and may you have the courage to speak out for
the excluded ones.
May you become the gracious and passionate subject of
your own life.
May you not disrespect your mystery through brittle
words or false belonging.
May you be embraced by God in whom dawn and twilight
are one, and may your belonging inhabit its deepest
dreams within the shelter of the Great Belonging.

Thursday, September 15, 2011

All things change and die and disappear.
Questions arrive, assume their actuality, and disappear.
In this hour I shall cease to ask them
and silence shall be my answer.
The world that Your love created,
that the heat has distorted,
that my mind is always misinterpreting,
shall cease to interfere with our voices.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

What do you say, Percy? I am thinking
of sitting out on the sand to watch
the moon rise. Full tonight.
So we go

and the moon rises, so beautiful it
makes me shudder, makes me think about
time and space, makes me take
measure of myself: one iota
pondering heaven. Thus we sit,

I thinking how grateful I am for the moon's
perfect beauty and also, oh! how rich
it is to love the world. Percy meanwhile,
leans against me and gazes up into
my face. As though I were
his perfect moon.

The way the dog trots out the front door
every morning
without a hat or an umbrella,
without any money
or the keys to her doghouse
never fails to fill the saucer of my heart
with milky admiration.

Who provides a finer example
of a life without encumbrance—
Thoreau in his curtainless hut
with a single plate, a single spoon?
Gandhi with his staff and his holy diapers?

Off she goes into the material world
with nothing but her brown coat
and her modest blue collar,
following only her wet nose,
the twin portals of her steady breathing,
followed only by the plume of her tail.

If only she did not shove the cat aside
every morning
and eat all his food
what a model of self-containment she
would be,
what a paragon of earthly detachment.

If only she were not so eager
for a rub behind the ears,
so acrobatic in her welcomes,
if only I were not her god.

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.
This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place,
I’ll be completely sober. Meanwhile,
I’m like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.
the day is coming when I fly off,
but who is it now in my ear, who hears my voice?
Why says words with my mouth?
Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn’t come here of my own accord, and I can’t leave that way.
Let whoever brought me here take me back.
This poetry. I never know what I’m going to say.
I don’t plan it.
When I’m outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.

One might say
I had decided to marry
the silence of the forest.
The sweet dark warmth of
the whole world
will have to be my wife.
Out of the heart of
that dark warmth
comes the secret that is heard
only in silence,
but is the root of all the secrets
that are whispered
by all the lovers in their beds
all over the world.
So perhaps I have an obligation to
preserve the stillness,
the silence, the poverty,
the original virginal point of
pure nothingness
which is at the center
of all other loves.

No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything

that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.
These pages seek nothing more than to echo the silence and peace
that is “heard” when the rain wanders freely among the hills and forests.

But what can the wind say when there is no hearer?

There is then a deeper silence:
the silence in which the Hearer is No-Hearer.
That deeper silence must be heard before one can speak truly of solitude.